I’ve spent the last few days at the World Investment Forum in Park City, Utah breathing in the spring mountain air and meeting with the other attendees about how they make critical partnering decisions. These C-suite and director level leaders of investment firms, pension funds and foundations tell me the most important component is figuring out whom to trust. This holds true whether they’re looking for partners to implement enterprise-wide software solutions, to provide research expertise or to perform special projects. One director-level executive told me that for a recent HCM (Human Capital Management software) project, she had spent a large amount of time choosing a cloud software solution, but had not given the same attention to the selection of the implementation team and now wishes she’d done more up-front due diligence.

The selection process is not about good or bad; it is much more nuanced than that. It is about which partner will be the best fit. Leaders want a partner that has the right capabilities, and will also be attentive and focused on delivering. I’ve found the process of finding partners boils down to these three steps:

1. Scanning the horizon

Leaders look to their personal or professional networks or other trusted information sources to find peers who have done similar projects or sought similar expertise. They want to make sure those peers undertook projects of similar scope and scale so that their experience is as relevant as possible. This can be a hit or miss process. Have you found enough relevant peers? Are their projects truly comparable? Today few options exist to truly know the outcome of consulting projects, which makes this challenging.

2. Listening to the voice of experience

Once they’ve found those peers, they ask whom they partnered with, whether or not they would recommend that partner, and whether there were lessons learned in how to approach the project. At this stage, they are compiling a list of recommended partners and learning what questions to ask. This can be a lengthy process, but one that is vital. Leaders want to hear the clear and simple truth, so they can find the partner that best fits their needs. Having testimonials they can share with their colleagues also helps to socialize the process, but they are hard to get and need to be from trustworthy, unbiased sources.

3. Interviewing and vetting

Whether it is through a proposal process or some less formal method, leader then interview and vet the potential partners on that list. This can be time consuming, but once again it’s about finding the right fit. Is the partner capable and eager at the right price? Of course, analysis like return on investment play an important role at this stage, but fit on the dimensions of expertise, experience, availability, and responsiveness are vital in choosing the right partner.

All in all, leaders wish the process were easier and less time consuming, but the critical consideration is seeking out trusted, unbiased advice to find a partner that is the right fit. A Chief Human Resources Officer told me that his firm usually tries to do all of their projects in-house, but that a recent partnering experience went so well that they’re considering doing it more often.

The need for clear and unbiased information about potential partners and consultants is obvious. It’s a gap we are looking to solve with a new approach… Stay tuned.